Emergent Co-ordination of Flow Control Actions through Functional Co-operation of Social Agents

This paper presents a distributed model for coordinating control actions in flow domains. The model draws from the metaphor of collectives of self-motivated social agents that end up cooperating functionally due to the effects of local motivations and global norms. In such a collective, the coordination of control actions gradually emerges among the agents. The authors illustrate the approach by a case study of traffic signal control.